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I have never heard
of Ling before. His "association-induction hypothesis" sounds interesting, at
least at first glance. There is a quick synopsis of it on his website
at:
Even if his
hypothesis is correct and it supplants the "membrane-pump theory", it is not
clear to me that this hypothesis would tell us the key
discriminator of life vs. non-life or, for that matter, that cancer, AIDS, etc
will succumb to cures due to insights related to this hypothesis as his
website's main page insinuates.
One consequence of his theory I do find
interesting is that 'association' and 'induction' both specify constraint
relationships between molecules of water, protein, etc. inside the cell.
(As opposed to these molecules simply floating around in solution inside the
cell.) This brought to mind Rosen's discussion of a maximally, or totally,
constrained system (1986, "Causal Structures in Brains and Machines", Int.
J. Gen. Sys. 12:107-126, or AS 427-428). In such a system, a maximal number of
nonholonomic constraints create a system where "...the impressed forces
of conventional analytic mechanics disappear completely; their only role is to
get the system moving. Once moving, the motion is completely described by the
constraints; i.e., by a system of first-order differential
equations." [1986, p. 108] In such a system, the velocities are
determined by the configuration alone. Rosen later notes that this is the only
kind of mechanical system which can accomplish the experimental result that
Morowitz pointed out years earlier: that a bacterial cell could be carefully
frozen to absolute zero (where all dynamics (all momenta) are removed) and
then re-thawed (with no real control over the specific imparted momenta) and the
cell could continue to grow. So, I wonder if the constraints represented by
"association-induction" take part in making a cell a totally
constrained system.
I also wonder how,
if at all, his theory impacts the notion of reaction-diffusion in a
cell.
Regards,
Tim
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